Machine-Type Communication (MTC) has a huge potential from the operator perspective. It is efficient for operators to be able to serve MTC UE using already deployed radio access technology. Therefore, 3GPP LTE has been investigated as a competitive radio access technology for efficient support of MTC. Lowering the cost of MTC UE's is an important enabler for implementation of the concept of “internet of things”. MTC UE's used for many applications will require low operational power consumption and are expected to communicate with infrequent small burst transmissions. In addition, there is a substantial market for the M2M use cases of devices deployed deep inside buildings which would require coverage enhancement in comparison to the defined LTE cell coverage footprint.
3GPP LTE Rel-12 has defined UE power saving mode allowing long battery lifetime and a new UE category allowing reduced modem complexity. In Rel-13, further MTC work is expected to further reduce UE cost and provide coverage enhancement. The key element to enable cost reduction is to introduce reduced UE RF bandwidth of 1.4 MHz in downlink and uplink within any system bandwidth.
The Rel-13 work item, “Further Physical Layer Enhancements for Machine Type Communication” [RP-140492] has agreed to provision a new UE class with RF bandwidth of 1.4 MHz for cost/complexity savings. Within a larger system bandwidth, this narrowband/low-complexity (LC) UE will be able to receive and transmit only over the UE bandwidth. The specification work is approaching finalization and the latest agreed description of the physical layer details can be found in [RP-152024] and [R1-157925].